Post Mortem: June 27, 2010 - July 3, 2010

British novelist Beryl Bainbridge, 75, was once called "a national treasure," and one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. A five-time nominee for the Booker prize and two-time winner of the Whitbread novel award, Ms. Bainbridge wrote more than a dozen books of fiction, non-fiction, and short stories. Football...

Louis Moyroud, 96, who helped revolutionize the printing process when he co-invented phototypesetting, died Monday at his home in Florida. Mr. Moyroud and Rene Higonnet developed the first phototypesetting machine in the mid-1940s. Sometimes called "cold type," the machine used the photographic process to generate columns of print without the...

William L. Taylor, who died Monday, was a longtime civil rights lawyer whose name was not widely known but whose experience and expertise made him instrumental to the business of Washington: hammering out the laws of the land. In his dogged efforts to strengthen the nation's civil rights protections, he...

As a young actor, Corey Allen, 75, was best known for playing the doomed high school gang leader who challenges James Dean to a "chicken run" in "Rebel Without a Cause." In the early 1960s, Ken Brown, a guitarist from Liverpool, was in a band called The Quarrymen with three...

Scrolling through The Washington Post's archives one day last year, I stumbled across the 1999 obituary of Vera Tolstoy, granddaughter of the "War and Peace" novelist Leo Tolstoy. When she died at 96, she was among the last survivors of the vast Russian family to have met her famous grandfather....

Bill Aucoin, 66, the man who discovered the band Kiss in the early 1970s and turned them into makeup-wearing megastars, died June 28 in Florida. Mr. Aucoin financed the band's first tour on his American Express, an investment that paid off when Kiss hit it big with the 1975 smash...

Nicolas Hayek, 82, the businessman who saved Switzerland's watchmaking industry and gave us plastic Swatch wristwratches, died unexpectedly today of heart failure while he was at work. Mr. Hayek was hired in the 1980s to give advice to two floundering Swiss watchmakers who found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy...

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, 92, a West Virginia Democrat and the longest-serving member of Congress, died early this morning at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Known for his stentorian orations seasoned with biblical and classical allusions, he saw himself both as institutional memory and as guardian of the Senate's prerogatives. A number...

As a youngster, John Thomas Walior helped chisel George Washington's nose on Mount Rushmore as a worker for the Civilian Conservation Corps. In college, he played football for Notre Dame. He was powerful singer, and was on his way to New York to join the Metropolitan Opera when his plans...

Martin D. Ginsburg, 78, a Georgetown University tax law professor whose blind date more than a half-century ago with a quiet undergraduate named Ruth Bader blossomed into an enduring marriage, died June 27 of complications from metastatic cancer at his home in Washington. Mr. Ginsburg joined the Georgetown faculty about...